Through the Barrier

Have you ever cooked with Chicken Tonight, jarred bolognese sauce, or whatever simmer sauce available on the market (forget the curry in my last post for a moment)? As they are generally referred to as simmer sauces, I thought the simmering process must be how the meat absorbs flavors from the sauce. It's not about letting the meat have a soak in the jacuzzi, right? How wrong I was! The taste stays in the sauce, which may even gain juice from the meat after a simmer and becomes tastier, but the meat usually ends up surprisingly bland.

But there was something else I observed in making other things that adds to this simmer sauce experience. I made stew quite a number of times before. Brown the meat first or not, throw everything in the pot, at the same time or may be not, wait a few hours, and voila! You have a stew, or perhaps, a casserool. Yes, yes, casserole. It is a lovely dish but purely in the sense of contrast, because everything tastes good, separately, cozying together in the same pot. But when I heated up the leftovers the next day, something happened. You might have seen it a lot of times before and never gave it a second thought. The potatoes looked darker, plainly having absorbed the liquid of the stew. So were the carrots etc., but it was most obvious with the potatoes as they previously were literally pale, in fact the palest of the lot. In terms of taste, they were beef, potatoes, carrots, etc in a stew before. Now, they were beef, potatoes, carrots, etc OF a stew.

So, it would seem that raw ingredients immersed in a flavoring liquid don't absorb flavors from the liquid during their first round of cooking. They may leach flavor into the liquid, though. Think soup.

Back to my butter chicken experiments, it only took the first try to reveal that recipe instructions for simmering previously browned meat are all about finishing off cooking the meat, be the recipe from a jar or otherwise. The 'failed' meat tells more, though. It was insipid besides being tough and shrunk, in spite of having been marinated before cooking. You know the saying "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." I tried again marinating the chicken with even more spices and herbs. And again, and again... Herbs and spices were flying in all directions and stuck to the ceiling and coating the windows. OK, that's an exaggeration, but you get the point. More herbs and spices did help more flavor to be retained after the simmer, but the chicken meat was still much less tasty compared to being cooked without the sauce.

I applied the new-found principle by stews in an attempt to preserve the flavor of the marinade. I cooked the marinated chicken pieces completely and cooled them prior to immersing them in the sauce. I then brought the lot back up to a simmer, and simmered just long enough to heat the whole dish through. The result was staggering. The chicken meat still lost most of the flavor!

The same was observed in marinated mince in a bolognese or other marinated meat cooked in a sauce. But then I pondered on the stew from a different angle. The ingredients started out having no flavoring, immersed in the flavorsome stock. Could it be a simple flavor diffusion thing?

Of course, it is. I marinaded the pieces of chicken meat as normal but intensely flavored the sauce. Voila! The meat hardly lost any flavor of the marinade after a simmer. It didn't even really matter whether I fully cooked or just browned the meat first.

So, there you go. I could not offer you any conclusion in my last post for finding a recipe to re-create the restaurant's butter chicken, because as the course of my experiments progressed, it changed my taste buds for curry. Not that there was no triumph, but triumph transcended the one-dimensional pursuit of a recipe. I guess, I gained the understanding of the truth about recipes. A recipe is an embodiment of individuality, mood, adaptation, and creativity. While there is no one best butter chicken recipe to me, I can offer the conclusion that there are two rules for making meats cooked in a sauce/liquid tasty, not just on the surface but on the inside too.